structures of loss (rope & knots)

Materials: scanned objects comprised of rope made from used chemex filters and hand towels, silk & linen, 2018. Various sizes.

These works explore the use of repetitive gestures as a method of meaning-making. By using structures found in rope-making, knotting and looping processes I attempt to give form to chaos, to measure the immeasurable. These small objects are made in response to my father’s experience of living with Alzheimer’s disease. Work in progress.

structures of loss (between us)

(between us) 8.5”x11”, 2018.

An ongoing collaborative bookwork project between myself and my father, Herb Jones. Contents include: his notes and drawings, our email correspondence, images that he has taken/developed, and my fragmented reflections on our relationship and his life.

Fathom

The word fathom refers both to a 6’ unit of measurement (historically stemming from the approximate handspan of a grown man), and “to understand or comprehend something”. Traditionally, fathoms, as a system of measure, are used to determine the depth of water. This on-going project also attempts to fathom water, albeit from an aesthetic and perhaps poetic perspective. The ocean is the point where the temporal and the infinite collide, endlessly speaking of the cyclical and metamorphic nature of life and death. During the development of the work, I began by weaving fathoms measured in relation to my own handspan, as a feminist gesture, as a way of exploring the place where the vast ocean meets the shore, as means to know the unknowable. Through the work, I wish to bring together a collection of non-human entities to encounter one another in a space where I am the observer and perhaps the catalyst, but not the main actor. As I am a visitor upon a visitor in Vancouver, this work attempts to both place and displace, to record a space between somewhere and everywhere.

Photo credit: Ben Portz

Fathom

Trace

Textile: handwoven with silk, linen, wool & rayon and dyed with indigo (2'x40'). Wall: slide taken in 1969 of my father in the Rocky Mountains (1"x1"), fragment of bedrock found the basement of the Banff Centre (3"x2"), partial cross section of Jack pine (4"x3"), handwoven tape (1"x80" wound). Drawings: charcoal traces on paper (charcoal sourced from a controlled burn site in Banff). 2017.

Tinctorial Cartographies: An Archive

Swatch Description:

The swatches were handwoven using cotton, linen, rayon, silk and wool (in both warp and weft). Each fibre is represented using three mordanting variables (ferrous sulphate, potassium aluminum sulphate and no mordant).

Through a process that feels nearly alchemical, each plant is transmuted into a viable source of colour. The dyed swatches become a complex chemical record as every fibre and mordant interacts with the dyestuff in a unique manner, thus creating a colour field of reactions and relations.

The swatches also serve to map my journey through the province. Marking harvesting site and season, they are cartographies of time and place.

All dye baths were conducted at 200% W.O.F. (weight of fibre) with a few noted exceptions.

Tinctorial Cartographies: An Exhibition

The impetus for this body of work emerged from the desire to undertake a focused study of Canadian natural dye plants. Given the geographical expanse of the country, building a vocabulary of Nova Scotian dyestuffs, a regional lexicon, seemed a viable place to begin. A selection of indigenous, naturalized and invasive plants from across the province were harvested and extracted over a twelve-month period beginning in January 2015. The process began by identifying candidate dye plants and acquainting myself with their ecological and cultural significance. Over time, the project grew to involve a more intuitive approach, wherein fieldwork would reveal significant plants within a given area and their dye-bearing potential would be discovered upon extraction in the pot. The act of walking and looking brought with it a highly embodied way of experiencing place, as each harvesting venture was shaped according to my encounters with vegetal life. Over the course of the year, I came to realize that the landscape itself was a repository of knowledge and that the presence and absence of various plant species offered insight into the ecological and social complexities of the province. It was the politics of land seen through a verdant lens, all but invisible to the untrained eye.

The swatches were handwoven using cotton, linen, rayon, silk and wool (in both warp and weft). Each fibre is represented using three mordanting variables (ferrous sulphate, potassium aluminum sulphate and no mordant). The dyed swatches become a complex chemical record as each fibre and mordant interacts with the dyestuff in a unique manner, thus creating a colour field of reactions and relations. Marking harvesting site and season, they are also cartographies of time and place.

The graph-like arrangement of the swatches intends to reference a common depiction of abstract data, as the graph is often used to visually articulate intangible information. Deployed in this context, the organization of the swatches seeks to imply the presence of the invisible aspects of the work. It gestures towards the actions of walking, looking and harvesting as the presence of the site is privileged in this arrangement: the graph is based upon the notion of a timeline or a map, a representation of the unseen.

The presence of the ‘take away’ document attempts to bridge this gap by building connections between swatch, plant, season and place. It endeavors to presence each botanical through multiple representations, using image and word to illustrate elements of its perceivable essence. The document references the familiar field guide, as it is a tool of identification used to unlock the language of the swatch. Once removed from the exhibition it becomes something else altogether, speaking for itself rather than the swatch.

Wall text: In the inert realm of the pressed specimen, the taxonomic object, there is a thing that speaks of another thing that is and was. As the classification process renders the physicality of the plant present, it leaves the complex whole of its being unseen. If the plant is fractured by the system, then the taxonomic word builds a new entity of knowledge with its fragments, making visible only some small element of the original, as the breadth of the plant's self can never be grasped by the limited gesture of the word.

Patterns of growth are a repository of knowledge, as they reflect the contemporary and historical circumstances of place. The presence and absence of plant species speak to the complexities of land, told from a verdant perspective, all but invisible to the untrained eye. Then there are weeds, the feral ones. Freed from cultivation and instrumentalization, they are self-determined, driven to travel the vegetal desire paths. These are the plants that follow the route of human action, revitalizing sites of disturbance and disregard, exercising agency through their very adaptability and proliferation.

The Botanical Sphere

This spatial sketch is intended to act as a visual representation of the botanical networks present in Nova Scotia. This interwoven web endeavours to speak of patterns of vegetal movement and to the complex interactions between plant species. Each thread present in the structure was dyed with a different plant harvested from Nova Scotia, the complete list of which (in common name) can be seen below:

108 Acres

These works mark the beginning of an investigation into private land ownership in the context of my familial settler history in Canada. It references the vegetal present as seen on my parents’ property on Denman Island, BC, land that was logged multiple times over the past century (most recently in the 1990’s). Across the property remnants of each cut remain, speaking of the effects of colonization, European-style economics and environmental policy.

Denman Island is the traditional territory of the Pentlatch people, whose language is no longer held in human memory. Given that language is the gateway to knowledge, with its loss comes the death of a way of knowing and seeing place, an understanding that evolved over thousands of years. The gap held in the centre of the first piece attempts to acknowledge both the human and vegetal absence on this land.

The format of the second piece endeavours to reference the transition the land has gone through, from forest to ‘natural resource’ (i.e. lumber or fibre), while its variegation points to the vacillating presence and absence of western red cedar, a key cultural and ecological species in the Pacific Northwest.

108 Acres Part II: handwoven with rayon and dyed with western red cedar. 6”x12’, 2016.

Vestiges

Filling spaces of temporary neglect, they follow the path of disturbance, rebuilding that which has been dismantled.

Weeds of subversion. Each speck of dirt scraped away, not a seed left behind. Such small deaths. Significant in their insignificance.

During the period between the demolition of St. Joseph’s Church and the excavation of the site (2009–2015), plant life inserted itself actively within the space. The site became host to a variety of early successional, native, naturalized and invasive species, including the escaped babies of ornamental plants and trees. These common ‘spaces of temporary neglect’ speak of our current and historical circumstances of globalization, colonization and migration, as well as of the continual reverberations of capitalism - as vegetal life inevitably follows the path of human action, revitalizing spaces of disturbance and disregard.

The development of a single lot is a banal occurrence in our cities, an everyday thing. And yet, as I watched the excavators dig deep into the ground I was struck by the fact that these actions were revealing geological formations that have not seen light for thousands or perhaps millions of years. Each speck of dirt removed, all vestiges of vegetal life gone. Therefore, this work is in a sense a monument, or memorial, for the insignificant vegetal beings that share our urban spaces. And for the profound yet everyday interventions which humans enact upon the world. As the body of each plant is literally etched into the cloth, a textile impression of its being remains.

Handwoven with wool and silk, and dyed with colour extracted from four plants/lichen (goldenrod, American elm, staghorn sumac and hammered shield lichen). All were harvested from the former St. Joseph's Church site on Gottingen Street, Halifax, in 2015.